Resilient Communication For Avalanche Response in Infrastructure-Limited Environments

Abstract: Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) offer a promising paradigm for maintaining communication in infrastructure limited environments, such as those encountered during natural disasters. This paper investigates the viability of leveraging an existing national transport system - the Swiss rail network - as a data mule backbone for disseminating critical avalanche alerts. Using The Opportunistic Network Environment (ONE) simulator, we model the entire Swiss rail network and conduct a rigorous comparative analysis of two seminal DTN routing protocols: Epidemic and PROPHET. Experiments are performed in two distinct scenarios: alerts originating from dense urban centres and from sparse, remote mountainous regions. Our results demonstrate that the rail network provides robust connectivity for opportunistic communication in both environments thus validating the integration of DTN principles in remote scenarios.